City Under the Sand

XI The Call of Steel

The streets of Akrankhot had not, Aric was certain, seen this much activity in a thousand years. Members of the expedition fanned out in small groups of anywhere from four to ten, searching street to street, building to building, for the metal believed to be hidden in the city. They shouted to one another constantly, people of each group checking in with the ones on the roads parallel to theirs. No one knew what terrors the city might hold, and if one group encountered something dangerous, the others wanted to be able to respond quickly.

Not every street was as prosperous as that first grand avenue they had seen, but overall, the city still seemed to have been a place of considerable wealth. Buildings had been tall, most constructed with a seeming simplicity that actually required a great deal of skill. And there were ornate touches, moldings and carved capitals atop fluted columns, friezes and murals, that gave the appearance of a population with an interest in artistic expression, and time to practice it.

It had only been a matter of weeks or months since the dunes burying the city had moved off it, but in that time, a wide variety of insect and reptilian life had moved in. Aric, Ruhm, Amoni and Damaric encountered an array of beetles, flies, ants, caterpillars, lizards and other small creatures as they explored the ruins. They also saw the beginnings of plant life, green shoots that had erupted from the earth as if welcoming the sun after such a long burial. These sights added to the impression of a city only recently deserted, rather than one left vacant even before the birth of the Shadow King, back in the mists of a forgotten age.

They covered three blocks of a narrow street, with buildings crowded so close together the sky seemed only a dull green ribbon overhead. Some doorways were open, other times they had to break through doors sealed shut by time and desert sands. Many of the homes looked as if people had walked out in the middle of their daily activities. They checked upstairs and down, to the extent allowed by the condition of the buildings, and outside one of them, Amoni made an observation. “We’ve seen that a lot of the staircases have fallen down,” she said.

“Right,” Damaric said. They were back in the middle of the street, and she pointed to the higher levels of a few of the buildings around them.

“And look at this. The windows on many of these upper floors have been sealed off with stone and mortar. Some of the doors, too. In many cases the towers, spires or what have you have been knocked down.”

“You don’t think that was from the pressure of the sands that buried the city for so long?” Aric asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” she admitted. Sand was everywhere. Farther in, the city was still buried, but even where the dunes had shifted off the city as a whole, it had left plenty behind. “But look here.” She led them to where a turret had crashed down from a three-story building, and squatted down beside a few good-sized pieces. She lifted one, pushed it away. Sand slid off when she hoisted the chunk, but beneath it, the ground was relatively clear. “If the sand’s weight had knocked this down, wouldn’t it have landed on a thick layer of sand? I think these—at least some of them—were brought down before the dunes buried the city.”

“Perhaps true,” Ruhm said. “But what of it?”

“I don’t know, Ruhm, I’m just speculating. It just seems odd to me—as if they had given up on the upstairs long before the city was abandoned. Even in the buildings we’ve been in, the staircases going up are inaccessible more often that those leading down. And sometimes the walls are still solid, so what would have brought the stairs down?”

“What do you think happened?” Aric asked.

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Perhaps,” Damaric said, “the city’s residents became afraid of something out there. Something that could climb, or fly, a dragon or some other beast from the sky. Perhaps they decided that going down was safer than going up. So they built down, collapsed any spires that might have attracted attention, blocked off their upper windows, knocked down their staircases so anything entering on those upper levels couldn’t easily come down.”

“And perhaps it got them anyway,” Aric said. “Or drove them from their homes. There must be some reason a city so grand would have been abandoned.”

“No water,” Ruhm pointed out.

“That’s true, if there were springs or a lake or anything in the area, it’s long since dried up,” Aric agreed.

“I’m not saying it’s important now,” Amoni said. “Whatever they feared is likely long gone as well. I just thought it was curious.”

It was, and now that Amoni had pointed it out, Aric saw more and more evidence supporting her theory. Like her, he didn’t know what it signified. But it did seem to point to a citizenry fearful of some threat, and that realization made him look at the ruins with a different eye.

After the fifth block, by prearrangement, everyone was to meet back at the main avenue running through the center of the city to report to Kadya what they had found. These reports were likely to be brief, unless some group had had more success than theirs.

They were two streets over from the avenue, within view of most of their comrades, when they heard the shrieks.

Dune reapers were possessed of a terrible patience that allowed them to wait in a single spot for days, or longer, secure in the knowledge that prey would sooner or later come into range. They would eat anything, including sand or stones, if need be, but they had a strong preference for freshly killed prey. They lived in subterranean colonies, where the dune reaper matron grew to enormous size while female warriors and male drones went out in search of sustenance. Sometimes dune reaper colonies moved, leaving behind their carefully crafted nests, for reasons little understood, although it may have had to do with changes in the availability of water or food.

These things Aric knew.

He had never before heard their haunting cries echo through the vast stone silences of an ancient city, or the skittering of their feet, the horrific clacking of their mandibles and the scythelike blades on their front limbs, or the weird chortles and chuffs they made when communicating with each other.

When he heard them now, Aric clutched at Ruhm’s arm.

“Dune reapers,” Damaric said. “A lot of them, it sounds like. Hurry!”

They broke into an anxious sprint, hoping to join their fellows before the reapers attacked. There were probably thirty soldiers around Kadya, and as many slaves, but other groups were also still on their way to the meeting point. One of these, seven in number, was on the last remaining street between Aric’s party and the grand avenue.

That was where the reapers struck first.

A slave running full-tilt for the protection of the larger group risked a backward glance and stumbled over a piece of debris in the road. Before she could get to her knees, a reaper warrior was on her. It shoved one of those long, slender blades between her shoulder blades, thrusting so deep that it emerged from her breast, red with blood. She gave a gasping cry and slumped forward, sagging on the blade. The reaper shook her free, and then two of its drones descended upon the slave, grasping her corpse with claws and dragging her away.

Ruhm held out a big arm, and the other three stopped where they were, hoping the reapers had not noticed them. More warriors and drones came into view, chasing the Nibenese. Two of the soldiers turned to fight. The reapers cut them down easily while drones sped past and felled the others.

“We’re cut off,” Damaric whispered.

As if it had heard him, one of the warriors slowly turned its head in their direction. The warriors’ builds were vaguely humanoid, in that they walked on two legs, and their heads sat atop their torsos and necks. But those torsos were lean and stringy, with ridges down their backs, short stumps of tails, and their heads long and bony, all snout and huge, toothy mouth and glowing red eyes. And the front limbs of the warriors ended in those blades, as if human beings had lashed longswords to their wrists in place of hands.

“Back away,” Amoni said.

Drones hauled away the bodies of the just-killed soldiers and slaves. Others advanced, with somewhat more care, on the larger group of Nibenese. Aric had no doubt they were using the Way to communicate as still others turned their awful heads toward him and his friends. Mandibles quivered, drool glistened where it fringed mighty jaws and gnashing teeth.

Two warriors, and their handful of drones, started toward them.

“Run!” Damaric shouted.

They ran.

They tore back one street in the direction they had come from, rounded the corner so the reapers couldn’t see them, and kept going. Their pounding feet drowned out any sounds the reapers might have made; that and the rush of blood in his ears seemed to Aric to have taken over all his senses. He could barely see where he was going, making out only choppy flashes of the street and buildings and his knees.

“Through here!” Ruhm called. He stopped in front of an alley entrance with a stone arch at the top. The narrow alley cut between two large buildings toward something—a courtyard, perhaps—at its end. Amoni went in first, her long legs covering ground almost as fast as Ruhm’s. Damaric went next, then Aric. Ruhm brought up the rear. The alley was barely wider than Aric’s shoulders. Ruhm had to turn sideways to squeeze through.

“They saw me,” Ruhm said when he emerged into the courtyard.

“But only one of them can fit through at a time,” Damaric said. “We can hold them off.”

Aric took in the layout of the courtyard. Tall buildings hemmed it in on three sides, blocking the worst of the sun’s rays, and a high wall ran across the back. It had survived the city’s devastation in remarkably good shape—but for a thick layer of sand over everything, it might have been abandoned the day before. In the cool shade, Aric felt the sweat on his sides and shivered.

“They might be able to flank us,” he said. “If they can climb that wall, or get into any of these buildings.”

“I don’t know if they’re that clever,” Damaric said.

“We may yet find out, right?” Amoni said. She and Ruhm took up positions at the alley’s end. Amoni was ready to hack any approaching dune reapers to bloody bits, Ruhm to pound those bits into the ground with his greatclub.

A drone came into the alley first, clacking and chuffing. The drones were smaller than the warriors, and where the warriors had those impressive bladed arms, the drones had thin arms ending in vicious claws.

This one skittered toward them on clawed feet. When it reached the end of the alley, Amoni swung her cahulaks at it. It reacted quickly, raising claws to block the attack, but the flail’s sharp blades slashed its arm. One claw, severed entirely, clattered to the ground. The drone let out a pained wail, which Ruhm silenced with a blow from his club.

Eight more drones tried the alley, only to be met by Aric’s sword, or Damaric’s singing stick, or Ruhm and Amoni working in concert.

After the last was slain, the moment’s peace dragged out so long that Aric grew concerned. “There were warriors,” he said. “Surely they haven’t abandoned the hunt.”

Damaric sniffed the air. “That sour-sweet smell?” he said quietly. “Smells like death, like rotting flesh? That’s them.”

“We’ve killed five of their drones,” Amoni pointed out.

“Aye. But they don’t smell as strong as the warriors. They’re near.”

Ruhm took in a great breath. “Yes,” he agreed. “Close by.”

All four of them heard the sound, a thump from inside one of the buildings facing onto the alley. “In there!” Damaric said.

Amoni had been inspecting the doorway of the house opposite, where some indecipherable runes had been burned into the wood. “This way!” she cried. “I think we can defend the doorway.”

The other three darted past her, and she closed the door just as five warriors emerged into the courtyard, two through a door and three dropping down from windows. The door had a heavy iron bolt, and Aric silently shot it after Amoni was clear.

The house they had entered had low ceilings and small rooms. They had come into a kitchen, with a washbasin and a stove made of mud bricks still intact.

Having taken that in, Aric watched the reaper warriors through a hairline crack between the door and jamb. They milled about in the courtyard, appearing confused. They don’t know which way we’ve gone, Aric thought. At the same time, his hand rested on the ancient iron bolt, and a strange certainty grew in him.

They only had moments before the warriors tried the door. But those moments, he was convinced, could count. He gestured the others through the kitchen doorway into the next room, empty but as cramped as the kitchen. A door was hung on iron hinges at the far side of the room, its heavy wood planks carved with strange runic symbols blackened with age. Aric grazed the iron hinges with his fingertips as he passed, and allowed a smile onto his lips. He felt like he hadn’t smiled in days.

He closed this door behind them as well. “The staircase,” he said. “Down. We’ve got to go down.”

“So those things can wait up here for us?” Amoni asked. “No.”

“We must,” Aric said. “It’s telling me to.”

“What is?”

“The metal in this place. It’s calling to me. We need to go down, and fast.”

Sure enough, around the corner was a staircase. The flight up had, as they had so often seen, been destroyed, but there were stairs leading down, in reasonable repair. “It’s dark down there,” Amoni said. “And we have no torches.”

“All the more reason the dune reapers won’t think we’ve gone that way,” Aric argued. “Hurry.”

“Metal speaks to him,” Ruhm said. Amoni and Damaric had heard this, and they knew why Kadya had brought him on the journey, but they had not seen it in action.

“And now it’s telling me we have to go down,” Aric said. “I’ll lead the way.”

“Then whatever’s down there will get you first,” Amoni said. “I’m game.”

With his agafari-wood sword in his right hand, Aric grasped his coin medallion with his left. It had no messages for him, but he felt a warming tingle. A comforting sensation, assuring him he was making the right moves. At last, he thought. Confidence spread through him with every step into the darkness.

When he reached a landing, he was lost in a pitch-black world. He tapped ahead with his foot, waved his sword ahead of him, but the staircase had ended. He touched the medallion again. “There’s another way down,” he said.

“Farther?” Amoni almost whined. Perhaps she didn’t like the darkness. Aric wasn’t fond of it himself.

He felt along the wall until he found another opening, with more stairs, leading down further. Above, they heard the crash of dune reaper warriors breaking through the bolted door, then the thumping about as they searched for the escaped Nibenese. But he kept going, silently, into the blackness, the others right behind. Each of them kept a hand on the next, as the dark was impenetrable.

The stairs led down and down, eight steps, a small landing, a turn and then eight more. The deeper they went, the more convinced Aric became that they were going the right way. There was a vibration in his head, almost a song, growing stronger all the time.

Then he realized that he could see a little, although they were far underground. They crossed a landing and at the bottom of eight more steps was a faintly glowing corridor of stone, the walls themselves somehow luminous.

“Ahh!” Amoni said. It was the first vocalization any of them had made since hearing the reapers above them.

“I think we’ve left our foes behind,” Aric said.

“And left Kadya and the others to deal with them alone,” Damaric added.

“I’ve no love for her sort of magic,” Amoni said. “But if anyone can defeat the dune reapers, it might well be her.”

“While we’ve found what?” Ruhm asked. “Illuminated rocks?”

“Unless I’m wrong,” Aric replied, “we’ve found what we were sent here for.”

“The metal?” Damaric asked. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” Aric said. “But we’re getting close.”

They reached the bottom of the staircase. The corridor extended in both directions, faintly lit, as far as the eye could see. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed of the same stone, the floor worn smooth as if from the passage of many, many feet over the centuries. More runes, like the ones on the door and others as well, were carved into the walls.

Littering the floor were bone fragments. Here and there, whole bones stood out, but most had been stepped on, crushed, broken by feet passing through here over the span of years.

“Ahh,” Aric said. “It’s some sort of battleground.”

“Or abattoir,” Damaric added.

“This must run beneath the entire breadth of the city,” Amoni said.

“At least,” Aric said.

“But which way do we go?”

Aric listened to the humming in his head. He pointed toward the right, which he believed was the east. “This way.”

“You’re sure about this?” Damaric said. “I’d hate to be lost down here.”

“You have to trust me,” Aric told him. “The steel calls to me.”

The others agreed, Damaric perhaps less happily than the rest, and they started in the direction Aric had indicated. They passed occasional doorways, most of those paved over with the same sort of stone. A few were open, and side tunnels led off in various directions, but Aric felt no pull to follow those. They kept to the main tunnel.

After what felt like ages, they reached another doorway. Like so many they had passed, stone and mortar blocked it. But the vibration was so strong here, Aric was surprised the others couldn’t hear it. His whole body tingled, all his fine hairs standing on end. “Behind here.”

“It’s sealed,” Damaric pointed out.

“We need to unseal it.”

“How?”

Ruhm pushed past the others, taking Aric’s agafari-wood sword from him. “Like this,” he said. He started jamming the hard wooden blade into the mortar, chipping it away little by little. The others joined in, using whatever slender implements they had, attacking the mortar rather than the solid stones. Soon, Ruhm had chipped away enough mortar from one of the upper stones that he was able to shove his fingers through and get a grip on the stone. “Back away,” he said.

The others complied, and he pulled on the stone, putting all his considerable weight into it. Mortar crumbled beneath it, and then the stone gave way, breaking loose several around it at the same time. They all reached into this larger hole and tugged together.

Soon they could step through the doorway. On the other side they found a gargantuan cavern. The walls of the cavern must have been where the stone for the corridor came from, as they glowed with the same gentle luminosity.

They were on a level slightly more than halfway to the cavern’s roof. A narrow stone staircase wound down, close beside a cave wall. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, stalagmites at the bottom reaching up to join them. In some places they met, forming columns. All of it was suffused with that soft glow. On each step, a different rune had been etched.

All over the floor and on every rock shelf and outcropping were bones. Thousands must have been slaughtered here. Animals, monsters, people—there was no way to know what the bones had come from. They were everywhere.

And the steel … the steel sang.

From this height, it was a shapeless, formless mass, sitting on the cavern floor. But Aric knew what it was. More metal than he had ever imagined in one place, mined and smelted and shaped.

“It’s here,” he said, his heart racing. “It’s really here, just as Nibenay said it would be.”

Damaric pointed down at the hulking shapes. “That’s all metal?”

“It is.”

“Incredible.”

Aric started down the stairs, almost at a run. “I know!”

Excitement built in him with every step down, until he thought he would surely burst. The singing in his head was louder than ever, like a choir of a million voices.

Then, on the way down, he spotted an almost whole skeleton, lying on a shelf of rock just off the staircase. He couldn’t make out what type of creature it had been—not quite human or elf, but something not too different, he believed. It was covered in cobwebs, and some of the brown bones had, over time, separated from the others. It, like everything else he had seen in this city, seemed impossibly ancient.

Jutting from the skeleton’s bony ribs was a steel broadsword.

Aric put down his wooden sword and leaned off the staircase as far as he dared. The tips of his fingers could just brush the sword’s hilt. But he couldn’t close them, couldn’t get a grip on it.

The sword wasn’t new—it was as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—but it looked intact. The workmanship, as far as he could see in the faint glow of the rocks, was spectacular. He longed to hold it in his hand.

Clutching his coin medallion in his left hand, he reached out again with his right and the sword hilt shifted, just enough to fall into his outstretched palm.

He closed his hand around the sword, and the singing in his head ceased so abruptly he wondered if he had gone deaf.

“Aric?”

It was Ruhm. Aric could hear—and besides, he reminded himself, it wasn’t my ears hearing that anyway.

“I’m fine,” Aric said.

“Good. Had me worried.”

“But look.” Aric drew the heavy sword from the skeleton, supporting his grip with his left hand to hold it steady. Its blade was long, gleaming in the rocks’ glow, and appeared to be in very good condition: old, with nicks and scratches, but still sharp and sturdy. “A steel sword, as fine as any I’ve …” His words trailed off, as the staircase seemed to turn inside out around him. The glow faded from the walls, and once again, Aric plunged into absolute blackness.